We
meet in his dressing room before a morning rehearsal for Fanciulla
and it is with Puccini's Wild-West classic that the conversation
starts. I point out that it's a work which is greatly admired but has
never achieved the popularity of some of Puccini's other operas. What
does Cura see as the reason for this?'It is true that Fanciulla is not an opera with a super-engaging, psychological background. It's not like Otello or Samson or Aida, which speak about betrayal, or Pagliacci which reflects the conflicts of show business. Fanciulla is a kind of idealistic love story, a Spaghetti Western, where the girl loves the boy and the bad guy hates both; it's a situation straight out of Hollywood. We have some ingredients there, of course, but it's not the kind of heavy plot that you would dedicate a month of Freudian analysis to. In that sense, the plot is sweet, it's light. It's an opera you go to and, for once, nobody dies; it finishes in a very optimistic way and everybody forgives everyone else. Considering what we see in the news every day, it's not bad to come to the opera and, for a change, not see people dying and betraying everybody. Fanciulla is probably not so extremely popular in that sense because it is not a tortured opera, it's almost a musical, in a way, although obviously not in terms of the composition, which is incredible.'
'Fanciulla, like Tabarro, like the last operas of Puccini, its an opera that moves almost in the rhythm of straight theatre, where people sing almost as if they're speaking to each other. It flows really well and Tabarro is the same, it's not an opera that allows for clichés in terms of acting and movement: you really have to act, to flow with the text in a natural way. It's the perfect opera in the sense of the evolution of the genre. Of course, for some people the perfect opera is one where the tenor stands and just delivers his aria. That might be the perfect opera for an old-style approach, but at the same time it can be very hard to be realistic in those melodramatic, old-style operas. You can try but there are times when you've just got to stand and deliver, because that's how it's written. With this work that's not the case, you can really be modern. It's the ideal opera for young people, for people who've never been to the opera who you want to bring for the first time, to seduce them for the future. Bring them to Fanciulla!'
Piero Faggioni's production is well known for its grand, cinematic sets (designed by Ken Adam, best known for his work on several James Bond films). Does the grandeur of the production make it more difficult to bring across the character of Dick Johnson?
'No, on the contrary. The fact that the staging is hyper-realistic, it allows you to just be the guy, to go and live it, to get into his skin and walk on to the stage as you would into a normal saloon. You don't have to imagine, say, that there's a chair on stage when there isn't, as you might in the kind of psychological mises-en-scène that are fashionable these days, or pretend you're somewhere when you're actually just in a black room.
'All that's very interesting, of course, but with this opera it's very difficult to carry off because the whole thing is there: the colours are there, the bangs, the fights, the smell of the gold is there. People have tried it and I've done Fanciullas that have been a bit weird, but they never work. I remember a Fanciulla two or three years ago when I walked on stage and there was a telephone, there was a fax machine, people had the Internet, there were antennae everywhere. So I said to the director: "Sorry, just one little thought: why is everyone so eager to receive the post when they're emailing all the time, why are they all nostalgic about their loved ones and homes being so far away when they can speak to them on the telephone every day?" The main thing in Fanciulla is the nostalgia; the violence also comes from the distance, from not being able to communicate and the feeling of isolation everywhere. So the moment you have all this modern communication equipment, the whole thing falls to pieces.'
Read more at MusicalCriticism.com
The
season closer in Bologna also marked its highest point, with Eliahu Inbal
delivering a terse and exciting rendering of a score where gushes of
plainchant and fugue nearly overwhelm a couple of memorable arias, a duet
and some famously lurid dance music on oriental scales. Who ever heard so
much counterpoint at the opera, particularly in Italy? Yet the house
ensembles bravely fought their way to the ‘tumbling’ finale and shared the
warmest applause with the Israeli maestro.
The
more than ninety photographs featured here document Cura’s
considerable travels around the world, as well as the people he
encountered along the way. The countenances captured by his lens
reflect the full gamut of the human condition: dignity, poverty,
old age, and loneliness. Accompanied by descriptions written by
Cura and other authors, this volume presents a panorama of faces
seen through the eyes of an extraordinary talent. 
